The Application and Effect Evaluation of Corpus Linguistics in English Teaching

This paper explores the application and effect evaluation of corpus linguistics in English teaching.It first introduces the basic concepts and development history of corpus linguistics,then analyzes its connection with language teaching theories,discussing the advantages and challenges of using corpora in language teaching.Next,it delves into the methods and technologies for building and utilizing corpora,as well as their role in developing teaching resources.Lastly,within the framework and methods of teaching effect evaluation,specific application cases of corpus linguistics in teaching design are analyzed,and their effects are assessed.Recommendations for teaching improvement and future development directions are also proposed.

On the Practice of Pedagogic Corpus Linguistics With Secondary School Iranian English Language Learners

The gap between the theories of second language acquisition and their practice in materials development has been a controversial issue in the field of applied linguistics. Recently, the findings of corpus linguistics have narrowed the gap. However, their practice, especially in the realm of vocabulary acquisition, has encountered pedagogic problems in the classroom because the authentic nature of the words in corpus-based examples was beyond the level of learners＇ comprehension which paves the way for the practice of pedagogic corpus linguistics. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to practice pedagogic corpus linguistics, and mainly data-driven learning, with the first year secondary school English language learners in Iran in terms of their vocabulary acquisition. To do so, 28 students participated in the study. Examples from the British National Corpus for the main words of each unit of their course book, Prospect 1, were presented to them in a course of 16 sessions. Those which were beyond their understanding were eliminated and those comprehensible for them, the pedagogic ones, were selected based on their reports regarding the comprehensibility of each corpus-based example.

A Corpus-based Investigation on News Attitudes towards the Belt and Road Initiative

Newspaper reports contain some attitudes in seemingly objective words. This corpus-based discourse analytical study,by comparing the use of semantic prosodies in the reports from China Daily and the Washington Post relating the Belt and Road Initiative, interprets the news attitudes presented by the two media toward it. The analysis of the news discourse will be carried out firstly with Antconc, a corpus analysis software which enables us to observe the most frequent co-occurrences of the phrases the Belt and Road, One Belt and One Road, New Silk Road and the initiative; and then COCA(Corpus of Contemporary American English) is involved to analyze the semantic prosodies of these co-occurrences, on this basis the semantic prosodies of the above phrases are revealed. The analysis of the semantic prosodies of the above four phrases in the two corpora shows that China Daily hold a supportive attitude toward the Initiative, while the Washington Post hold a complex one.

Improved Metaheuristics with Deep Learning Enabled Movie Review Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment Analysis(SA)of natural language text is not only a challenging process but also gains significance in various Natural Language Processing(NLP)applications.The SA is utilized in various applications,namely,education,to improve the learning and teaching processes,marketing strategies,customer trend predictions,and the stock market.Various researchers have applied lexicon-related approaches,Machine Learning(ML)techniques and so on to conduct the SA for multiple languages,for instance,English and Chinese.Due to the increased popularity of the Deep Learning models,the current study used diverse configuration settings of the Convolution Neural Network(CNN)model and conducted SA for Hindi movie reviews.The current study introduces an Effective Improved Metaheuristics with Deep Learning(DL)-Enabled Sentiment Analysis for Movie Reviews(IMDLSA-MR)model.The presented IMDLSA-MR technique initially applies different levels of pre-processing to convert the input data into a compatible format.Besides,the Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency(TF-IDF)model is exploited to generate the word vectors from the pre-processed data.The Deep Belief Network(DBN)model is utilized to analyse and classify the sentiments.Finally,the improved Jellyfish Search Optimization(IJSO)algorithm is utilized for optimal fine-tuning of the hyperparameters related to the DBN model,which shows the novelty of the work.Different experimental analyses were conducted to validate the better performance of the proposed IMDLSA-MR model.The comparative study outcomes highlighted the enhanced performance of the proposed IMDLSA-MR model over recent DL models with a maximum accuracy of 98.92%.

A Comparative Study of the Usage of Synonyms Based on BNC-Taking Assessment and Evaluation as Examples

The discrimination of synonyms has always been one of the great challenges for English learners.Taking assessment and evaluation as examples,this study analyses the similarities and differences of the two words,as well as their usage from the perspectives of frequency,stylistics,collocation and semantic prosody with the help of British National Corpus,and demonstrates the importance of corpus retrieval tools in synonyms discrimination.Furthermore,this paper will give some suggestions for English learners and teachers in English vocabulary teaching.

Progress and prospect of critical discourse analysis

The present paper reviews the theoretical framework and analytic methods of Critical Discourse Analysis （CDA） and then introduces the latest development of CDA from the perspectives of linguistic anthropology, cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics. The prospect of CDA is accordingly advanced.

Intensifier-Verb Collocations in Academic English by Chinese Learners Compared to Native-Speaker Students

It is difficult for L2 English learners in general, and especially Chinese learners of English, to form idiomatic collocations. This article presents a comparison of the use of intensifier-verb collocations in English by native speaker students and Chinese ESL learners, paying particular attention to verbs which collocate with intensifiers. The data consisted of written production from three corpora: two of these are native English corpora: the British Academic Written English(BAWE) Corpus and Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers(MICUSP). The third one is a recently created Chinese Learner English corpus, Ten-thousand English Compositions of Chinese Learners(TECCL).Findings suggest that Chinese learners of English produce significantly more intensifier-verb collocations than native speaker students, but that their English attests a smaller variety of intensifier-verb collocations compared with the native speakers. Moreover, Chinese learners of English use the intensifier-verb collocation types just-verb, only-verb and really-verb very frequently compared with native speaker students. As regards verb collocates, the intensifiers hardly, clearly,well, strongly and deeply collocate with semantically different verbs in native and Chinese learner English. Compared with the patterns in Chinese learner English, the intensifiers in native speaker English collocate with a more stable and restricted set of verb collocates.

Authenticity and College Oral English Teaching

This paper aims to explore how to bring authenticity into oral English class. By discussing a number of conversational features which are prominent in every day interaction, but are lacking in the standard English material our students are learning every day, we suggest that everyday conversation is different from standard written English, so taking standard written English as a model in our oral English class is not feasible. We believe that applying CL （corpus linguistics） and CA （conversation analysis） into oral English classroom to design the learning material and classroom tasks is a good way to enhance the authenticity of language learning.

An Investigation of the Semantic Prosody of Synonyms--The Case of“Weichi(维持)”and“Baochi(保持)”in Chinese

In order to better apply the semantic prosody theory to distinguish synonyms,this article chooses to use analysis software and corpus to specifically compare and analyze the difference between“weichi(维持)”and“baochi(保持)”.Although both“weichi(维持)”and“baochi(保持)”show neutral colors in the dictionary,through analysis of collocation words,it is found that“baochi(保持)”is often matched with positively colored words,so it has positive semantic characteristics,while“weichi(维持)”is more neutral and negative semantic prosody characteristics,and in the diachronic and synchronic word frequency survey,the word frequency of“baochi(保持)”is higher than that of“weichi(维持)”.

Identification of Topics from Scientific Papers through Topic Modeling

Topic modeling is a probabilistic model that identifies topics covered in text(s). In this paper, topics were loaded from two implementations of topic modeling, namely, Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). This analysis was performed in a corpus of 1000 academic papers written in English, obtained from PLOS ONE website, in the areas of Biology, Medicine, Physics and Social Sciences. The objective is to verify if the four academic fields were represented in the four topics obtained by topic modeling. The four topics obtained from Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) did not represent the four academic fields.

A Contrastive Study of the Semantic Prosody of Degree Adverbs——The Case of“Ting(挺)”and“Guai(怪)”in Chinese

If the collocation of a word creates a semantic atmosphere in the context,it will infect the word,so that it has a certain semantic prosody.Based on corpus,this paper chooses ting(挺)and guai(怪)as a case study.This study combines description and interpretation,qualitative and quantitative analysis,and uses semantic prosody theory and related software technology to make a contrastive analysis of semantic prosody of degree adverbs ting(挺)and guai(怪)from synchronic and diachronic perspectives.We find that the semantic prosodies of ting(挺)and guai(怪)belong to positive prosody and negative prosody respectively,which are related to grammaticalization.

A Study of the Semantic Prosody of Adverb of Degree -The Case of “Très (Very)” in French

The collocations of lexical item are able to create a certain semantic atmosphere in the context,which will infect the lexical item and thus give it a certain semantic prosody.Based on the literature corpus,this paper takes the French degree adverb“très”as the object of study.Combining description and interpretation,qualitative and quantitative analysis,the research uses linguistic analysis software as well as semantic prosody theory to analyze its semantic prosody.The study found that“très”possesses mixed semantic prosody.

Formulaic Sequences in L1 and Advanced L2 Chinese Learners' Writing

This corpus-based study cmploys statistical analysis to compare the use of non-compositional formulaic sequences by high proficiency Chinese learners and native students.The top 5 overused and underused patterns by Chinese users are identified.Features of their usage point to a lack of register awareness as well as linguistic resources,while showing individual differences.

LEXICAL RICHNESS IN L2 ACADEMIC WRITING

This preliminary study investigates the relationship between lexical richness and communicative effectiveness in placement essays for graduate students whose first language (L1) is Chinese. Lexical richness is measured with Nation's web-based vocabulary profiler (Cobb, undated) software, and communicative effectiveness is scored by multiple raters. The structure of the study, lexical data compile review, results analysis, and teaching implications will be discussed. The study indicates that lexical richness needs to be taken into account in scoring the quality of writing. However, further investigation and analysis still need to be developed and discussed on the ongoing study.